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Your Typing Solution

The Minuum keyboard, through its simplicity, improves your touchscreen typing. Existing keyboards leave you barely enough screen to interact with your apps, and you can’t enjoy typing on them. Minuum eliminates the visual clutter of archaic mobile keyboards by adapting the keyboard to a single dimension. What enables this minimalism is our specialized auto-correction algorithm that allows highly imprecise typing. Your typing on mobile devices is inherently imprecise—and there’s nothing wrong with that. We work with that. By reducing the keyboard to a single dimension, Minuum opens up your touchscreen space for a variety of interaction possibilities—which allows for precision-entry.

Features at a Glance

Minuum improves mobile typing by:

Recovering more than half of the usable touchscreen space you lose when you type on traditional virtual keyboards

Allowing you fast text entry when your typing is sloppy

Providing you with letter magnification for precise typing—especially useful if you have large fingers

Giving you the benefit of smart auto-correction

Respecting your familiarity with the QWERTY keyboard so you don’t have to re-learn the keyboard layout

Letting you type anywhere—with a keyboard you can move around your touchscreen

You will be able to customize the Minuum production release, with options such as: alternate colour schemes to match your smartphone case, curving keyboard layout for more ergonomic text entry, and the ability to rearrange the alphabet to your liking.

International Languages

Minuum is extensible beyond the 26 characters of the English alphabet and can accommodate any language based on the Latin alphabet, plus punctuation, numbering, symbols, emoticons, or other inputs.

Wearable Typing (and Prototyping) Is Here

The Minuum layout is simply a continuum of letters, laid out in a row. We call it “one-dimensional” because it’s based on one row of keys. This frees up the keyboard to be anywhere you like on the screen, or even to curve for a more ergonomic keyboard shape. This arrangement also means you can type without needing complex sensors or flat surfaces, which means we can do away with large physical keyboards or touchscreens completely. If there is a place where you can measure one dimension of user input, Minuum will let you type there. This means being able to type practically anywhere, including with wearable technology.

Going Beyond Your Touchscreen

The simplest way to migrate Minuum from touchscreens and onto an edge, surface, or object is with a flexible resistive touch strip. You could then make a keyboard using common household supplies like graphite (from pencils), or sew the strip into fabric using conductive thread. As long as you can measure how far along the strip you are touching, Minuum will let you type fast and accurately without your needing to aim for letters precisely.

In fact, with Minuum you can even type without any surface at all, simply by measuring the orientation of your hand gestures in the air. You can do this in several ways, such as:

With an accelerometer/gyroscope in a ring, watch, armband, or handheld device

With a camera capturing the hand from something like a Kinect, Leap Motion Controller, or Google glasses.

With only one dimension to measure, these kinds of typing systems are easy to make—and easy to use, even in noisy and constrained sensing environments.

Extensibility

You can incorporate Minuum into existing categories of devices to let people type anywhere. For example:

Watches—A simple infrared or laser setup built into a watch, which measures where a someone’s finger breaks the beam, can allow wearers to type on their arms.

Game controllers—These are notoriously painful to type with. You can use an analog stick to quickly type an e-mail using the Minuum layout, without needing to be precise.

We have been prototyping and developing each of these Minuum applications mentioned above. If you are a developer of wearable tech devices, we'd love to hear from you about how you'd like people to type with your device.

Use Cases

Accessibility

Minuum is accessible and, in different forms, can adapt to your typing needs. However tech-savvy you are, Minuum’s touchscreen keyboard can meet your text-entry style. Users with disabilities mark one end of the continuum, and we will be testing our technology on applications that allow us to serve them.

Platform Support

Google Android currently provides the most popular ecosystem that allows alternative virtual keyboards, so we will initially develop Minuum for availability to you through the Google Play Store.

Since Apple’s restrictions on iOS do not allow you to replace the default keyboard, we will make a Minuum version for iOS app developers to include in their software. Check out our developer support.

We can also help others put who want to put Minuum on touchscreen devices using other operating systems (for example, Windows Phone, BlackBerry). Interested? Let us know.

iOS Developer Library

You made your app look appealing. Why let the keyboard get in the way of that? We welcome iOS application developers implementing Minuum as their go-to typing method. Minuum is an ideal option wherever you show a lot of information or type a lot of text.

To help you develop Minuum-enabled apps, we will produce an iOS developer library, which you can license.

Contact us about licensing the Minuum iOS SDK to get started. If you want your keyboard to fit the look-and-feel of your app, let us know!

Progress So Far

We have prototyped a Minuum app for iOS and have pivoted to developing an Android app. (See Platform Support, above, and Apple’s iOS app restrictions.) Right now we have a working prototype of the Android app.

Development Roadmap

Near-term projects include:

Android touchscreen Minuum keyboard beta release to our crowdfunding supporters two months after the end of our campaign

As you can see, by supporting us you get access to our beta release at least two months before everyone else.

Wearable Development Kit

If we’re funded, you’ll be able to use an open Minuum wearable development kit (WDK) in about a year’s time. This will allow anyone—even non-specialists—to incorporate typing into everyday things. The Minuum project involves applying our virtual keyboard algorithms to other typing needs beyond touchscreens. Soon, you’ll be able to type quickly and accurately using a variety of wearable devices. Many of these haven’t been imagined yet, and our WDK will help you build those devices you dream of. Want to create a sweater that types or put a keyboard in your iPhone case? Using our WDK you’ll be able to connect to Android, iOS, Mac, or windows platforms and send the text you want.

Timeline for the Minuum Project

The Ask: How You Can Help

If a future with wearable computing, as enabled by the Minuum project’s one-dimensional keyboard, looks astounding to you, it is. You can help us bring that future closer. We’ve received some seed funding through the UTEST program and from MaRS Innovation, but we need your help.

We have a software developer we’d like to hire to produce the beta version on Minuum for Android—working under our guidance. We’re seeking $10,000 to help complete this development of a fully functional Android Minuum. That’s our campaign goal. We’re asking you to help us accomplish this.

Bonus

Beyond producing an Android Minuum beta, an additional $50,000 would help us produce an open wearable development kit (WDK) so we can enable you to start prototyping wearable typing devices. That’s our stretch goal. By helping us advance the Minuum project, you not only get our heartfelt thanks but also the satisfaction of championing some far-reaching technology—which is pretty cool.

Backstory

Minuum was inspired by a U of T research project: invent a better way of typing on touchscreen mobile phones without looking. This encouraged us to investigate various device-tilting techniques relying on user motion—which we understood to be useful in the field of wearable technology. The Minuum virtual keyboard for touchscreens is simply one extension of this approach. As a result of our research, we took the following steps to bring the technology to life:

Designed a new alphabet layout

Developed the disambiguation algorithm

Ran user studies with various device-tilting techniques, finding that people could type at up to 37 words per minute, using carefully designed audio feedback, without any visual feedback or looking at their phones

User motion, though imprecise, allowed us to type amazingly well. Since we realized our technology had uses beyond this cool new rotational text entry method, we pivoted to focus on creating a better touchscreen keypad. We founded Whirlscape to make this happen. All along we’ve been looking ahead to a new wave of typing with wearable technology. What we’ve created so far is much cooler than what we originally set out to do. We received some support for the Minuum project from UTEST program and MaRS Innovation and now we need your help to take it even further.

Technology Team

Will Walmsley, CEO of Whirlscape, lead designer

M.A.Sc., University of Toronto, 2012, Human Factors Engineering

Honours B.Sc. (Eng.), Queen's University, 2010, Engineering Physics

Walmsley has invented a diverse range of interaction techniques ranging from bendable mobile phones to novel 3D surgical displays to revolutionary methods of mobile typing. He has a passion for human-computer interaction (HCI) and simplifying technology.

Associate Professor, University of Toronto, Bahen Centre for Information Technology.

Truong’s research interests are in HCI and ubiquitous computing (Ubicomp). His focus is on enhancing usability and usefulness within the scope of mobile computing experiences. This involves investigating:

Tools and methods to support the development of novel ubiquitous computing systems

Techniques and models to facilitate user interactions with off-the-desktop computing devices and services

You'll get early access to the Minuum beta version for Android, before we release it to the general public, and free access to future premium versions.

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claimed

Estimated delivery: June 2013

$10USD

Shout-out + early access

Thanks for caring! On top of getting early access to the keyboard, you'll also get your name listed on a special supporter page of our website.

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claimed

$25USD

Wacky poetry magnets (+ more)

You'll get a specially crafted set of fun fridge word magnets. Ever wanted to use "disambiguation" in a sentence? Now's your chance! You'll also get all the above perks: early access to the Android beta, and a shout-out on our website.

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claimed

Estimated delivery: May 2013

$50USD

Super cool t-shirt! (+ more)

Support Minuum in style, with a t-shirt created by our lead designer! You'll also get all the above perks: early access to the Android beta, a shout-out on our website, and a set of wacky poetry magnets!

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claimed

Estimated delivery: May 2013

$100USD

VIP access

Permanent special early VIP access to all software apps, libraries, and development kits that we create, forever! We'll of course also take special interest in your feature requests. You'll also get all the above perks: early access to the Android beta, a shout-out on our website, a set of wacky poetry magnets, and a t-shirt!

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claimed

$500USD

Ultimate Supporter

Wow! Thanks. You are truly a technology visionary, and you'll get recognition as such on our site with a custom profile. You'll also get all the above perks: early access to the Android beta, a shout-out on our website, a set of wacky poetry magnets, a t-shirt, and permanent VIP access!